stuff 'n other stuff

I started out, innocently enough, looking for images from the Crimean war, and falling through a set of internet rabbit holes, found myself looking at a website devoted to early erotic daguerreotype and ambrotype stereographs.

Stereographs are of course made from a pair of slightly offset images, that viewed from the correct distance through a viewer give an impression of a 3D image.

Popularised by David Brewster among others, stereographs were very popular in the early days of photography, and obviously they were popular for more than viewing pictures of Queen Victoria being graciously pleased.

The erotic images are perhaps a little less explicit than those you can find on the internet today, the models are plumper, pubic hair is rather more evident, but basically not a lot has changed in the 150 or so years since these images were made. And interestingly quite a few of the surviving images have been expensively hand tinted suggesting that there was a market willing to pay and pay well for such material.

I’m reminded of the diarist Frances Kilvert’s comment on a visit to London which included an attempt to buy  some religious photographs from a shop in Burlington Arcade and that the proprietor of the gallery was reputed to  sell obscene French photographs, suggesting that such material was available to those with the money to pay for it and the business was profitable enough to cover the running costs of a shop in an upscale location …

[27/07/2016]

Coincidentally, I happened across this article on early French erotic postcards a few days ago – worth a read if you’re interested in the seamy side of Victorian life …

On our back deck, beside the outside tap, we have a couple of ornamental bamboos in pots. This afternoon, as I was filling a bucket, I noticed something shiny under the roots of one of the plants and, being curious by nature, I had a closer look.

It was a coin, a ten pence coin, but one from the Isle of Man. Well, neither of us has ever been there, and we can be sufficiently sure of Australia’ strict biosecurity laws to guarantee it didn’t come with the plants or the potting compost.

The pots do however have an ornamental stone mulch on the top. These mulches are quite often come from Thailand, Indonesia, or elsewhere in south east Asia, so it would just about be believable if I’d found a couple of one or two baht coins.

My only guess is that sometime between 1992, when the coin was minted,  and whenever a river somewhere in south east Asia was dredged for river pebbles, someone from the Isle of Man who was visiting the area slipped and dropped a couple of coins.

I’ve written before about out of area coin finds, such as Roman coins in Africa and of course the Kilwa coins, so it was kind of interesting to have a personal experience such as this, even if it was with something as mundane as a 10p coin from the Isle of Man …

  John Leech’s 1861 cartoon for Punch of a man reading from Collins’s book. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

I’ve been rereading Wilkie Collins’ ‘Woman in White’ while at the same time watching ‘The Bridge’ on SBS, and I’m struck by their similarity of structure – lots of individual events and stories, told (or centered) around different characters, all of which appear initially to have no real connection and some of which become connected, and others vanish.

While we were at Tathra last week we went to Green Cape for a swim at Bittangabee and a walk from the lighthouse back towards Bittangabee via Pulpit Rock.

About 300 metres from the car park you pass the cemetery from the wreck of the Ly Ee Moon which came to grief sailing from Melbourne to Sydney on the evening of the 30th of May 1886.

It’s quietly affecting especially the list of the dead, including such pathetic descriptions as ‘an unknown Greek, given passage at the request of the cook’, and ‘a man with a German accent’.

However, I was also intrigued by the name of the ship, which was clearly Chinese, at a time when most ships in Australian waters had staunchly anglo names.  As in many things wikipedia is your friend – search it for Ly Ee Moon and it comes up with Lei Yue Mun, the name of a channel in Hong King harbour, not surprising given that the ship was first built as a paddle steamer for the opium trade. She also had a walk on part as a blockade runner sailing into Charleston during the American civil war when paddle steamers were preferred due to their ability to handle shallow draft harbours rather better than the screw powered ships of her time.

After her time as a blockade runner she returned to Asia, ferrying Chinese migrants to Cooktown and acting as a backup mail ship should the telegraph cable from Darwin to the Netherlands East Indies fail, and somewhere along the way was rebuilt as a screw powered vessel, caught fire and was scuttled and raised again, and became a ship on the Melbourne – Sydney run.

The wreck itself was controversial – the lighthouse was operating and conditions were such that it should have been clearly visible. There were strong suspicions of incompetence at the time but nothing was ever proved.

History is all around us – you just need to look.

It’s an open secret we’re fixing our house up for sale. Having decided to retire there didn’t seem much point to staying on in Canberra – rural Victoria seemed a way better option.

Of course when you put your house up for sale you realise that the kitchen ceiling needs repainting, the toilet door lock really should be fixed, and that little bit of board needs installing.

So, last week we reached the point where (almost) everything was done save some outside weeding and and pruning, and we decided to reward ourselves with three days on the coast.

We went to Tathra, which also gives you a digital detox. Cellphones don’t work there – not quite true, up on the headland, Telstra ones do, but if you’re Optus, Virgin, or anyone else, forget it.

Down on the bay, not even Telstra works. Which is kind of interesting. No one looks at their phones in restaurants. They talk to each other.

Of course, as we found when we went for an evening picnic, some unexpected places get a signal, but basically from about 10km out of Merimbula, north to the edge of Bermagui, there’s not a deal of coverage.

Which is fine. Promotes a relaxed lifestyle, and if you do need to check email or twitter, it’s either a coffee somewhere with free wifi or a drive up the coast.

Gets you off the treadmill we make for ourselves.

There we were, sitting on a beach in the Mimosa rocks national park sharing a picnic and watching the sun go down,  when my phone rang.

A surprise in itself, as we expected to be well out of cellphone range, but it was a Victorian number, so as we’re buying a house in Victoria, I answered it

Bad mistake.

“This is a short automated survey about federal politics”

For a millisecond I was tempted to launch my phone into the waves.

Don’t these people understand people have lives and only sad people are going to fill in a survey…

When I first lived in York, I lived in Milner Street, in a brick terrace house built in the early 1860’s by the railway company to lease to its clerks.

The name ‘ Milner’ always puzzled me – the adjoining streets were Beaconsfield Street and Gladstone Street, names that were a little too early for the 1860’s, but then the streets had clearly been bit piecemeal with blocks of half a dozen houses being built separately.

My guess is that sometime at the end of the nineteenth century the council decided to tidy up the street names and (re)named the streets after notables of the time.

Beaconsfield was of course Disraeli and Gladstone was self evident. But Milner ?

My best guess is that the street was named for Arthur Milner, the British High Commissioner for the Cape Colony and one of the instigators of the second Boer war. I could of course be hopelessly wrong, but the only Milner of note in Wikipedia is indeed Arthur Milner.

I’ve got to confess that I only heard of Arthur Milner while watching a travelogue on tv where the host visited a pub called the ‘Lord Milner’ in Oudthoorn – something deeply symptomatic of the lack of information about the Boer war.

Later on I lived elsewhere in York, in a street built in 1904 and with an impeccably English name, but one of the cross streets was named Colenso Street, something I always thought a trifle weird and out of place. Not until I read Thomas Pakenham’s history of the Boer war did I realise that Colenso was the site of an important battle of the war.

At the same time, my parents lived in Edzell, a village in Angus, Scotland, hard by the Kincardineshire border. Unusually, as well as the conventional war memorial for the first and second world wars, it also has second memorial, this time to the Boer war – the immediate question being why Edzell and why not other towns?

When it comes to the Boer war it’s as if a veil has been drawn over the whole sorry story of the war, and a sorry story it is too.

However the Boer war is more than just the story of a colonial landgrab  – if it hadn’t been fought the experience of the BEF in France during the early days of the first world war might have been sorrier than it was, for the simple reason that the Boer war was the first time in fifty years the British did not simply fight hopelessly outgunned tribal levies, but fought a foe equipped with modern weapons and an understanding of modern warfare.

So why is the Boer war so little discussed ?

Around a week ago, some people were getting quite excited about finds of high status Roman pottery from Carlisle, and how it suggested that it was more than a rude frontier settlement on the edge of empire – one commentator went so far as to claim that proved that Carlisle was not just ‘hairy barbarians selling cows’.

Myself I’m not so sure. Analogy is a dangerous game but one possible analogue is the mid nineteenth century gold towns of Victoria.

These towns were established quickly, were often formalisations of existing miner’s camps and were usually nicely and regularly laid out by colonial surveyors.

Among the first things built (after pubs) were usually some imposing and quite massive bank buildings, plus a post office and a court house. And of course the banks in particular were staffed by bank officials who expected the conveniences of mid Victorian life even if they were surrounded by gold miners and kangaroos.

So these people would have lived in nice houses, had nice crockery and probably drank imported wine from nice glasses, all of which would probably turn up in the archaeological record were we to look.

The people who lived in these nice houses would have been very much a minority. Most of the population would have been gold miners, often of Irish or Chinese descent. The Chinese are particularly interesting as a proportion of them came via California where they had been pushed out due to an increasing hardening of US attitudes to Chinese migration. The consequence is that in some of the camp areas or around the mines US and Mexican silver coins from the 1850’s sometimes turn up – either lost or hidden by their owners.

The Irish and other miners of European origin in the main only left whisky bottles and bits of discarded equipment behind them. The point is that the majority of the community was materially poor and only had their mining equipment and the clothes they stood up in. If we didn’t know about the Chinese we might even think that the coin stashes were associated with the high status houses and hypothesize about a shortage of Sterling currency in 1850’s Victoria, and people hiding their portable wealth.

So, the presence of nice pottery does not imply that everyone was prosperous, it implies that some people might have been and that might be because they had high status occupations and expectations – bank officials in colonial Victoria, imperial functionaries in colonial Carlisle …

New Year’s Eve and what to do?

We had our prawns, a bottle of champagne in the fridge, and our evening planned, but we had a dead space in the afternoon.

So rather than mooch and read we went to the Tom Roberts exhibition at the NGA.

Tom Roberts was a seminal nineteenth century Australian artist who knew everybody, mentored Streeton and others of the Heidelberg school. Nowadays he’s mostly known for his portrait of Parkes and his quite remarkable beard and the massive painting of the Duke of York opening the first Parliament of the newly minted Commonwealth in 1901.

But there’s more to the man that that – portraits of great and the good, landscapes, and perhaps most interesting impressionist (with a small i admittedly) paintings done on cigar box lids for the Melbourne 9 by 5 exhibition – Australia’s own analogue of the Vienna Secession movement.

Added up you get a complete picture of the man and his work – society portraits painted to pay the rent, consequently very conventional as the sitter go what the sitter wanted, his own more innovative experiments, including some quasi impressionist oil sketches for the opening of Parliament painting – Roberts was clearly using what he’d learned in his impressionist moments to try out combinations of colour to get the light and the atmosphere right.

Previous summer exhibitions at the NGA have involved collections from overseas. This one is different, but no less interesting – the NGA curators have not only borrowed paintings from the big state art galleries such as the AGNSW and NGV, but have also scoured the smaller regional galleries to track down less well known examples of Roberts’ work and melded them to tell a story of Roberts and his work. Outwardly a respectable society painter, and a safe pair of hands for major works, but behind closed doors a raffish innovative painter not afraid to try new things.

[and if you’re there over lunch, skip the gallery restaurant and try the Vietnamese street food cafe outside – pork banh mih, grilled chicken skewers and excellent coffee]

Like everyone used to in the dark pre-internet ages I used to have a diary for appointments. Full of scribbles and crossings out but a bound hardback diary.

It also served as a record of what I’d done over the year, expenses claimed, notes for petty cash, but basically it was an appointment book.

Sometime in the mid nineties it became a Filofax, which made the notekeeping easier, and then sometime around the millennium I bought myself a Palm Pilot (I’m lying – it was a Handspring Visor, a palm pilot clone bought from an online computer disposals store) and I never looked back.

Everything online, synced with outlook, meeting reminders, offline email composition, note taking. I was in heaven. It was a truly wonderful device.

And I kind of stopped using paper diaries. I’d keep a day book, but that kind of degraded into an unstructured heap of scribbles.

But this year I tried something different. I bought myself one of these planner diaries – with a week on the left and a blank page for notes on the right. And I would keep notes about discussions, outages and problems in it as well as writing major appointments in it – I still used my smartphone and google calendar to run my life.

And each week the last thing I did on Friday was scan that week’s double page and save it to Evernote.

And it’s been invaluable.

Am I away three weeks tomorrow – easy. What day did a system have it’s SSL certificate updated? When in June did I go to Sydney? All easy.

And because I name all my notes about things yymmdd_name.ext it makes it easy to find the correct document in either evernote or dropbox by using the diary as an index.

So, fifteen years after I stopped using a paper diary, I’ve started again …